Another popular scam technique is called an "initial coin offering (ICO)." A potentially legitimate investment opportunity, ICOs are essentially a way for startup cryptocurrency companies to raise money from future users: In return for sending active cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, customers are promised a discount on new cryptocoin.
Having an ICO doesn't make the coin/token a scam, most big market cap coins/tokens have ICO on their end but look where they are right now. IMO, the most successful one is Ethereum
https://icodrops.com/ethereum/ and that's almost x2000 gains to those hodlers of ETH this time around.